The Candle

Halden was a red dwarf with one dead planet, one station, and a drift of wreckage where the Lantern should have been.

The Ninth Fleet came out of the jump in good order, nine hulls in a line, and Dara had the plot filled before the drive had finished whining down. Halden Station hung on the far side of the dwarf, a grey wheel the size of a town, dark except for a ring of docking lights. Between the fleet and the station, tumbling slowly in the dwarf's thin light, was a frigate's drive section with no frigate attached to it.

"That is not the Lantern," Jonah Lindqvist said from the sensor deck. "Hull number is wrong. That is the Candle. Severance frigate, lost at Vesper nine years ago. She has been drifting out here since the war."

"Then where is the Lantern?" Captain Okafor said.

"Not here, sir. Not in this system. I would see her."

"The station?"

"Docked, maybe. The station's ring is big enough to hide a frigate." Jonah paused. "Captain, there is something else. The Candle's drive section is warm. Somebody has been working on it. Recently."

Admiral Brannock, who had said nothing since the jump, said, "Lieutenant Voss. Take a corvette and a boarding party and go and look at that wreck. Do not go near the station. Do not answer the station if it calls you. Find out what somebody wanted with a nine-year-old Severance drive."

"Aye, Admiral."

The corvette Wren was the smallest hull in the fleet, a Mark III drive and six guns and room for thirty if they liked each other. Dara took twelve: eight marines, Ensign Okonkwo for the drive tables, Crewman Sayer because he had asked and because he had been a dock hand on Serrat and knew wreck work better than any of the marines, and herself. Ensign Tomas Brannock had asked too. Dara had said no. The admiral had not looked up from the plot when she said it, and Dara had understood that she had been meant to say no, and that the admiral would not thank her for it.

The Candle's drive section was a cylinder two hundred metres long, sheared off at the forward end where the frigate's spine had broken. The Wren matched its tumble and put the boarding party across on lines. Dara went in third, behind two marines, into a dark that her lamp made worse.

"Lieutenant." Sayer's voice, on the suit channel. "Look at the housings."

She looked. The Candle's coil housings had been cut open, every one of them, and the old Severance resin dug out of the seams. In its place somebody had pressed fresh Vashti resin, honey-coloured and still faintly sweet through the suit filters. The stamped mark on it was not a Three. It was a figure Dara had never seen on a resin block.

"Grade Five," Okonkwo said, reading it. "There is no Grade Five, Lieutenant. The Vashti grow three grades. The Chief said so."

"The Chief said what the Admiralty buys," Dara said. "Not what the Vashti grow." She moved her lamp along the housing. The coils themselves were wrong too, denser, laid in a pattern she had only seen in a schematic once, in a sealed Admiralty brief that Brannock had let her read and then burned. "Sayer. What does this look like to you?"

"Looks like somebody is building a Five, Lieutenant," Sayer said. "A Mark V drive. Out of a dead frigate and resin that doesn't exist."

"Nobody outside the Aurum yards has the Mark V."

"Then somebody at Halden has been to the Aurum yards. Or the yards have been to Halden."

The question sat in the dark between them. Who had given a rogue outpost the plans for the Empire's best drive? Dara filed it under the things she would say to the admiral and not to the deck, and kept moving.

They were forty minutes in, halfway down the cylinder, when the Candle woke up.

It was not an attack. Dara understood that later, when she had time to understand anything. It was a timer, or a tripwire, or simply a half-built drive that somebody had left warm because they meant to come back to it. One of the rebuilt coils lit, and the housing next to it, sealed with resin that nobody had tested, did not hold.

The cylinder tore open along a seam twenty metres long. Dara saw it go as a line of white light, and then the air that had been trapped in the wreck for nine years went out through it and took everything loose with it.

She was on a line. Six of the marines were on lines. Okonkwo had clipped on the moment she came aboard, because she was two months out of the academy and still did everything the manual said.

Sayer had unclipped to get at the housing. He went out through the seam with the air.

"Sayer!" Dara had her own line in her fist and was hauling herself toward the gap before she had decided to. "Sayer, answer!"

"Here, Lieutenant." His voice was very calm on the suit channel. "I'm clear of the hull. Tumbling a bit. Suit says I've got... suit says the seal's gone at the hip. I've got about a minute, I think."

"The Wren is coming. Hold on."

"Wren's four minutes out, Lieutenant. I can see her." A pause. Breathing. "It's all right. I was a dock hand. I know what the numbers are."

"Sayer..."

"Tell the Chief it was the Five housing that went. Not the Three. Tell him his resin's fine." Another pause, longer. "And Lieutenant. The coin's in my locker, in my kit. The ten-scrip. I'd like you to have it. You're the only officer who ever asked what it was."

"You can give it to me yourself."

"No, I don't think so," Sayer said, quite gently, and then the channel carried nothing but breathing, and then it carried nothing.

The Wren reached him three minutes later. The marines brought him in. Dara did not look at his face when they took the helmet off; she had already seen it, in her head, and did not need to see it again.

They brought the rest of the party back to the Cinder Crown in silence. Dara reported to the admiral on the flag deck with the hull of the Candle still on the screen behind her, bleeding frozen air into the red light. She told Brannock about the housings, and the coils, and the resin with a grade that did not exist. She told her that Crewman Ode Sayer was dead. She said it in that order because that was the order the admiral would want, and hated herself for knowing it.

Brannock listened without moving. When Dara had finished, she said, "Crewman Sayer's effects go to his named beneficiary. Does he have one?"

"A sister, Admiral. At Halden Station. He had not heard from her in two years."

"Then they go to you for now, Lieutenant, since you were his officer, until we can find her. Ensign Brannock, see to it." The admiral turned to the plot. "Captain Okafor. Somebody in this system is building a Mark V drive out of Severance scrap and alien resin we were told did not exist. Somebody gave them the plans. I want to know who, and I want the Lantern, and I am beginning to think those are the same question."

"And the station, Admiral?" Okafor asked.

Brannock looked at the grey wheel on the far side of the dwarf, dark except for its ring of lights.

"The station," she said, "has just started calling us. Lieutenant Voss, you will want to hear this. The voice on the channel is giving his name as Lieutenant Caius Voss, second officer of the Halden Compact, and he is asking for you by name."

Tomas Brannock came back onto the flag deck an hour later with a small cloth bag and set it on the plot table at Dara's elbow without a word. She opened it when the deck was quiet. Inside was a ten-scrip coin, worn almost smooth, the first money Ode Sayer had ever earned. She closed her hand on it and found that she could not stand the plot and hold it at the same time, and put it in her breast pocket, where it stayed.